Car or Truck Steering Pulls to One Side Check These 3 Possible Causes

Does your car or truck pull to one side while you're driving down the road? That's what I'm gonna talk about in this video. If you have a vehicle that's pulling, some of the first things you wanna check out is tire pressure. Tire pressure is crucial and it's important that all the tires have the exact same tire pressure, or whatever the manufacturer recommends front to rear. You can always check the tire pressure on the door. Most vehicles have that pressure right there. If you find that one of your tires has low tire pressure it probably has a leak and it needs to be fixed. With the vehicle raised up you wanna see if any of the wheels are frozen, whether there's a stuck caliper, your brakes are stuck, they're holding, or even a wheel bearing that's frozen and causing one wheel to stick. That's gonna cause a pull. So check all four of those and make sure those are good. While the vehicle is up in the air, you can check the front suspension and the steering to see if there's any play in any of the front end components. If you have play in one of the components it's not necessarily the cause of the pull. There could be if it's an extreme issue. If there's an extreme play in a wheel bearing that can cause a pull.

You could also have one of the tires causing the pull. Take a look at the tread on the tire. Make sure it doesn't look like there's any slipped belts. What a slipped belt would look like is a bump in the tire. As you turn it, just see if the tire looks like it's flat, or even the abnormal treadwear could cause a pull. So what you can do to check this, take this tire off, take the other front tire off and swap them, drive it again. If the tire pull moves then you've got a problem with one of the tires. If you confirm that the tire pull is coming from one of the front tires, most of the time the bad tire is the one that's causing the pull. The next step to confirm that that was the tire would be swapping that tire that's causing the pull to the rear. Rotate those two, drive it again and see if your pull is gone. If all those check out, the most likely cause of the vehicle pulling to one way or another is the alignment being off.

Now let's talk about the alignment adjustments. Pretend these wheels are on your car. When a vehicle drives down the road they wanna be pretty much as close to straight up and down as possible. One of the adjustments is called the camber adjustment. Now if the camber adjustment is out this is an exaggerated image of what the tire would look like, but if it's out on one side, then that's gonna cause the pull to the right. And then if it's out on the opposite side, that's gonna pull to the left. And it can tip in as well and this would cause a pull to the left as well. So that's your camber adjustment. And then you have your toe adjustment which is pretty much the front of the tire is tipped in or the front of the tire is tipped out. Now that adjustment is not gonna cause the vehicle to pull but it will make your steering wheel off center or your tires to wear. And then you have your caster adjustment, which is a little bit more confusing to understand how it works and you can't see it. You would need an alignment machine just to show how it works, but basically it is the angle at which the tire rotates, so the center axis of the tire. So that would be a more extreme angle and then that would be a more relaxed angle. If you think of caster as how the ball joints are located where the top ball joint is in reference to the bottom one, that's gonna be your steering angle. It's a little bit confusing but that's how it works. And those adjustments are actually right here, so if you loosen this one and move the upper control arm in, and this one out, that's gonna move the ball joint forward and vice versa. For the camber adjustment, what we talked about earlier, basically the top of the tire in or out, those...you would adjust both of these together. You would loosen them up, move the cams in or out depending on how far in or out the alignment is. And your toe adjustment would be your tire rods, tightening them or loosening them. And this is all stuff you wanna do on an alignment rack. You don't wanna do this in your backyard, unless you wanna use the string alignment method that we actually have a link in the description on how to use that. That will get you by for a little time.

Another thing to think about is road crown. Most roads have a slight crown so that they're tipped to the right for drainage purposes and when you're driving down the road that could be causing you to pull. So if you're on the highway, if you end up being in the left lane, sometimes the crown tips to the left side, and if your vehicle pulls to the left when you're in that lane, chances are there's nothing wrong with your vehicle. You're just feeling the road crown.

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